St. John’s-based Trophi.ai, which is developing artificial intelligence software for e-sports coaching and eventually real-world sports, has raised a round of seed funding led by Halifax’s Concrete Ventures and several angel investors. 

Co-founded by tech sector veteran Mike Winters and former race car driver Scott Mansell, Trophi.ai is developing software to give players of racing simulators, such as the popular iRacing and Codemasters’ Formula One games, computer-generated feedback about how to improve their performance.

Winters is a Memorial University-trained computer engineer who has worked for IBM, as well as New York senior care startup Mavencare. He has moved home to St. John's from Vancouver because he believes it is a great place to build a startup. Mansell has driven an array of different racecars at a professional level -- including old Formula One cars that he repurposed for other racing series -- and runs the popular DRIVER61 YouTube channel.

“It turns out, if you really start thinking about motorsport and e-racing -- which is basically video game racing, but it's quite high quality -- it's arguably the best place to start (developing AI),” Winters told Entrevestor in an interview. “It has the simplest input system... You basically have a throttle percentage and brake percentage, and you have a steering angle.”

On the advice of Concrete Ventures, Winters declined to name the size of the funding round, citing worries that competitors could use the information to back-calculate the valuation at which Trophi raised money. But he said the deal was “at the higher end” of what a startup would usually raise in a seed round.

Since they founded Trophi in Dec. 2020, Winters and Mansell have been gathering data to train their AI system by offering an e-sports coaching service with the help of contractors. The coaches are usually young adults, selected for their own driving skills during what Winters described as “a grinder of an application process.”

The coaching has so far allowed Trophi to gather data from about 100,000 laps of virtual race tracks and 3,500 drivers, supervised by between 10 and 15 coaches.

Winters said they have now gathered enough data to begin training their artificial intelligence system, which they plan to start selling next year as a cloud-based software suite.

He and Mansell plan to eventually offer a similar AI system for physical sports -- first real-world motorsports and then other categories. They are starting with e-sports because it is possible to gather data without physical sensor arrays.

Later this decade, for example, he hopes it will be technologically feasible to integrate sensor suites into tennis rackets.

Once the AI coaching software is up and running, though, the duo still plan to continue with the human coaching services.

“I think (the business) will be 80 percent AI, so there’ll still be 20 percent for coaching,” said Winters. “And having the two I think is a massive strategic advantage. If you think of some of the optionality that gives you know how you develop this, it’s a major advantage.”

Scott Mansell sits in a Lotus Formula One car.

Trophi’s co-founders are also preparing to go on a hiring binge. The coaches are scattered around the world and typically only work part-time. But in the next 18 months, Winters said he hopes to hire 15 people at the company’s Newfoundland offices, including between three and six software engineers.

The exact number of new hires will depend on their levels of experience, with more battle-tested programmers possibly allowing for a smaller team.

Winters added that he plans to favour on-site employees because he believes remote work does not foster the nimbleness and free exchange of ideas that are crucial for startups.

The one exception will be Trophi’s head of operations, who is based in the United Kingdom and started as one of the driving coaches before asking to take a more active role in the business.

“Daniel (Handover) has been working with us since day one,” said Winters. “He's been working really hard and done an excellent job. And there's no way I'm going to release someone for doing that just because they’re not in the right location.”